> NBA Winners by Genre

National Book Awards Acceptance Speeches

Rachel
Carson,
Winner of the 1952 NONFICTION AWARD
for
THE SEA AROUND US

Many people have commented with surprise on the fact
that a work of science should have a large popular sale.
But this notion that "science" is something that belongs
in a separate compartment of its own, apart from everyday
life, is one that I should like to challenge. We live
in a scientific age; yet we assume that knowledge of
science is the prerogative of only a small number of
human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories.
This is not true. The materials of science are the materials
of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living;
it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in
our experience. It is impossible to understand man without
understanding his environment and the forces that have
molded him physically and mentally.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth.
And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether
biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then,
that there can be no separate literature of science.

My own guiding purpose was to portray the subject
of my sea profile with fidelity and understanding. All
else was secondary. I did not stop to consider whether
I was doing it scientifically or poetically; I was writing
as the subject demanded.

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what
they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty
in them, science will discover these qualities. If they
are not there, science cannot create them. If there
is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because
I deliberately put it there, but because no one could
write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.